5 . Just what is the wine promising ?
She carried out this task , along with starting this first drink later . And she found that , again , this disrupted the pattern and had her drinking much less than normal without even really trying .
You can enjoy one glass of wine and make it last . Savour it . Drink it over an entire evening . After the second week , that ' s exactly the task I set for Caroline ( and we hypnotically rehearsed her doing this ahead of time ). I told her : " Make sure it ' s big , a really big glass of wine ."
Because I was talking the language of ' a lot of wine ' it didn ' t feel like deprivation . All of a sudden , the only glass of wine she really enjoyed was a really big glass . She was actually drinking more ' enjoyable wine ' in her evening . Reframing . Don ' t you just love it ?!
But there ' s one more aspect of every addiction that is key to helping our over drinking clients .
5 . Just what is the wine promising ?
Hidden beneath the cloudy surface of conscious awareness , in the depths of addiction , is a promise . Unmasking that bogus promise and seeing it for what it is can go a long way towards disentangling from the serpentine grip of addiction .
I heard once about a group of travellers whose vehicle broke down in a vast , baking desert . They soon ran out of water and found themselves waiting and wilting for days in the broiling heat . So what happened ?
One of the men became so thirsty he resorted to drinking engine oil . He died . Not half an hour later the surviving members of the team were rescued and given real water . The fact is , nothing but water was ever going to quench that need for hydration . And that one man that gave in paid the ultimate price for seeking fulfilment of his needs in the wrong place .
The capacity for our species to try to meet legitimate needs in ways which ultimately strip us of our humanity is breathtaking – literally so with cigarettes . But the same goes for wine , shopping , porn , cannabis , cocaine , heroin , even the addiction to feeling certain things or seeing oneself as virtuous .
The habitual , psychological element to an addiction may be much stronger than any physical addiction . I urge you to take a look at this video to see why ultimately any compulsion , any addiction , promises what it can never deliver .